The Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which raised U.S. duties on hundreds of imported goods to record levels, is America's most infamous trade law. It is often associated with--and sometimes blamed for--the onset of the Great Depression, the collapse of world trade, and the global spread of protectionism in the 1930s. Even today, the ghosts of congress "It is, to put it mildly, a challenge to write an interesting and lively history of tariff policy. In his graceful study of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, economist Douglas Irwin successfully rises to the task. . . . Scholars of the period will find much that is valuable in Irwin's analytical and readable narrative."---Jason Scott Smith, Journal of American Studies